Chris Marker

Sans Soleil - The First Minute. Chris Marker : Sans Soleil. Sans Soleil / Sunless The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.

He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black. He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. He used to write me from Africa. He wrote me that in the Bijagós Islands it's the young girls who choose their fiancées. He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.
Eyes moving la jetee. 'Chris Marker: La Jetée' by Janet Harbord. Chris Marker's "La Jetee" has been a totem for nearly half a century.

It's a haunting half-hour film enshrouded in mystique. Marker (born Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, either outside Paris, as many sources say, or in Ulan Bator, as the writer and director has claimed), has a godlike reputation among cinephiles, thanks both to the ingenious and often playful nature of his essayistic films (he's made dozens) and to his obscurity. He grants few interviews and almost never allows himself to be photographed. Only a fraction of his movies are available on DVD. Thankfully, "La Jetee" is one of them. "La Jetee" is the story of a man "marked by an image from his childhood," as the voice-over narration informs us, a man who becomes a soldier during World War III and then the subject of time-travel experiments in civilization's post-apocalyptic remnants under Paris.

In "Chris Marker: La Jetee," Janet Harbord attempts to unravel the film's mysteries and confirm its significance.
The Eternal in the Blink of an Eye, Chris Marker (1921-2012)
In one extraordinary moment of cinematic history, a sleeping woman awakes.

A series of still images focus on her resting face, tumbling after each other until… movement. Eyelids open, mouth cracks a half-smile—the slightest of gestures that release the spellbound viewer. The scene occurs two-thirds of the way through Chris Marker’s fifty-year-old, post-apocalyptic masterpiece, La Jetée, a “motion picture” made up entirely of still images, save this one. Marker, who died on July 30 at age 91, made La Jetée on a shoestring budget with minimal music, slight voiceover narration, and black-and-white stills that pack the half-hour work with a wealth of worldly hopes and fears. (Terry Gilliam remade the gist of Marker’s narrative in 1995 and released it as the feature-length Twelve Monkeys). At the outset we learn World War Three has occurred, nuclear bombs have been dropped, the end is at hand.

Marker was perpetually interested in travel; across time and through space.
Junkopia - A Short Film by Chris Marker. Chris Marker: PASSENGERS. Chris Marker: resistance fighter, escape artist, film-maker – in pictures. Tocm_pk.pdf. Www.icarusfilms.com/press/pdfs/tocm_pk.pdf. To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter - Home.

'Thrilling and prophetic': why film-maker Chris Marker's radical images influenced so many artists. All That Is The Case: On Susan Howe’s Chris Marker. All That Is The Case (Notes)
Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat. Visionary French filmmaker Chris Marker (1921–2012) created vivid film-essays that lace realism with science fiction and lyricism with politics.

Changing his name, declining to be photographed or interviewed, Marker was both enigma and legend. His influence extends across art, experimental film and mainstream cinema: his 1962 masterpiece La Jetée was the basis of Terry Gilliam’s 1995 Twelve Monkeys.
Sans Soleil - Poetry will be made by everyone. Tous autour de Chris Marker !
La jetée (english subtitles)
La Jetée Captured. The Lost Futures of Chris Marker by J. Hoberman. Gracefully off-kilter, stylized as semaphores, the shadow of a man and an outlined woman are positioned at the center of a sea shell spiral.

Are they dancing on air—or falling into the void? The poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is scarcely less haunting than the movie. I first saw the image, without understanding what it was, as a nine-year-old on summer vacation and carried the memory with me for some twelve or fifteen years before I first saw the film.